


Waltz of the Dreamers

by joufancyhuh



Category: Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: F/M, Nutcracker AU, Twisted Lore
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-03-09
Updated: 2019-03-24
Packaged: 2019-11-14 12:09:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 3,338
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18052265
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/joufancyhuh/pseuds/joufancyhuh
Summary: The Shadow King, sensing Lavellan’s power, comes for her in her dreams. But her wolf companion takes the form of a man to fend the Shadow King off. Now the two must defeat the King if Lavellan is ever to be safe again.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [NilesDaughter](https://archiveofourown.org/users/NilesDaughter/gifts), [LadylikeFoxes](https://archiveofourown.org/users/LadylikeFoxes/gifts).



> This started off as something weird, and progressed into something weirder. It was originally meant as a Ficmas gift for Niles, but as usual, I bit off more than I can chew. However, I plan to complete this. I'm also gifting this to ladylikefoxes, because I don't ship this, but I love her and she does.
> 
> I've gotten some other chapters already written but I'm going to try something new and do a posting schedule. Insanity, I know. So tune in next week for a new chapter!

“Marie! Marie!” Little Louise Lavellan bounced up to her older sister as she tended the garden, the younger Lavellan’s cheeks pink as she huffed from her running. Marie wiped the dirt from her hands onto her pants and rose, waiting with patience for her sister to speak. What happened this time? Louise only acted this way when tattling on their eldest brother.

Sure enough, when Louise drew enough breath back into her lungs, the first word out of her mouth was, “Fritz!”

“Is he hurt?” Marie grabbed her staff leaning against their home.

Louise shook her head, her black pigtails whapping her in the face from the force of it. “Come see!” She snatched Marie’s hand and began to drag her into the woods that sheltered their clan’s encampment. Marie stumbled after the younger girl’s quickened pace, struggling to keep up. This was why she stuck to tending the gardens or practicing magic: less running. But she managed to keep Louise in her sight, who gave up dragging her sister to sprint toward where she left Fritz.

When they reached the small clearing, Fritz kneeled over a large black animal. His brown eyes flicked up to glare at Louise. “Snitch,” he hissed. “I told you not to tell her.”

“Tell me what,” Marie responded, trying not to sound as out of breath as she felt. Her eyes fell from Fritz to the animal in front of him, which upon closer inspection, she recognized as a wolf. Her heart jumped into her throat. “Oh no. Fritz, tell me you didn’t…”

“I thought it was a bear. It was in the underbrush, I didn’t realize-“ Fritz rose to his feet, dusting off the knees of his pants. “He’s still breathing, but I got him good in the side.”

Marie brushed past him, falling to the ground to look over the animal. It growled as she approached, but she whispered words of caring as she stroked its fur, waiting for the wolf to relax. When it did, she slowly moved her hand toward the matted area. It snapped, causing her to reel back, but she kept her voice even as she continued to pet it. “ _ Ir abelas, fen’mirthadra _ .” The wolf calmed as it registered her words, and she tried again to find the source of the blood on its fur. As she did so, she explained what she did to it.

“I can heal you, but please be patient with me,  _ fen’mirthadra _ . I am only my Keeper’s Second, and my magic is not as strong as the others in my clan.” She glanced up to where her brother stood, hip cocked to the side with his arms crossed, as if her rectifying his mistake was an inconvenience for him. “ _ Etunash _ , Fritz. You may have cursed our clan with this action, yet you stand there like a petulant child.”

Fritz’s frown turned up into a sneer. “I didn’t know it was the forest guardian! You can hardly blame me when he looks like any other animal out there.”

The wolf raised his head and snapped in Fritz’s direction. Marie turned her head to hide a giggle while her wandering fingers made contact with the source of the bleeding. “A-ha!” The wolf whimpered in response to the touch but didn’t try to attack again. It only turned its head in her direction and stared with pain in his cloudy blue eyes.

Louise, after careful consideration, kneeled down by her sister and stroked the wolf’s fur. “Will he be okay?”

Marie moved her palm over the wound where the arrow pierced him, a small grass-green light brimming from the center of her hand. The wolf whined, his breathing picking up, but otherwise stayed flat against the ground. Fritz pushed the arrow through before their arrival, which didn’t give her a chance to see how much damage he wrought.

But as her magic flowed through her, her spell swept into the wolf, mending as it did. She more felt the tendrils of her magic than saw where it healed, and with a little more concentration, she quickened it until it retracted back, leaving only a purplish delicate scar on the wolf’s side. Marie’s own chest heaved, her brow broken out into a sweat. Magic exhausted her, especially extensive magic such as healing. She wiped her brown with the back of her hand and smiled down at her charge. “You’ll be sore for a few days,  _ fen’mirthadra _ , and I wouldn’t recommend too much movement. When we get back to camp, I’ll bandage your side in case the wound reopens.”

Fritz scoffed. “Camp? He’s not coming back with us to camp. Who’s going to carry him?”

Marie rolled her eyes, standing up to shove at her brother’s chest. Sometimes she felt as though she were the oldest of the three, with the way her brother acted. “He needs to rest. Out here, he’s open to attacks until he gets better.”

“If we bring him back, the Keeper will know what I did.”

“And if you don’t bring him back, I’ll tell the Keeper what you did and how you then left him to die.” The two siblings growled at each other, jaws locked and arms across their chests.

When Marie didn’t relent, Fritz sighed and uncrossed his arms, running both hands through his midnight black hair. “If he bites me, I’m going to drop him and leave him here for the crows.”

Marie turned apologetically to the wolf, who watched the two of them. “He doesn’t mean it,  _ fen’mirthadra _ . He is a devout worshipper, as are we all. Thank you for the protection you have given us. We only wish to offer you the same while you recover from my brother’s mistake.”

Louise scratched between the wolf’s ears, staring down at him while he leaned into her touch. “Can I name him?”

Marie shook her head, grabbing her staff off the ground. Blood from the wolf coated her hand, leaving a dark stain on the wood of her staff. “We don’t name the forest guardian. He has a name.”

Louise grinned down at the wolf, who thumped his tail in response. “How about Fen? Do you like that name?”

The wolf thumped its tail again and licked her hand in response. Marie groaned. Her two siblings were going to be the death of her.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Marie tells Louise a bedtime story.

In the end, Marie didn’t rat out Fritz, instead blaming fen’mirthadra’s wound on a passing shemlen hunter. The Keeper nodded gravely and assigned their guardian to stay with Marie in her aravel until he felt well enough to go on his own. “It is an honor,  _ da’len _ . Feed him and bathe him, show him only the best so that he may continue to bless our clan with his protection.”

Another hunter brought them meat from a deer he felled, which  _ fen’mirthadra _ accepted. In the aravel, Marie wrapped a bandage around his side after washing his fur with water from the nearby river. She banned Fritz from their home for the night, lest he somehow commit a worse offense to the clan’s guardian. Louise involved herself with “Fen”’s care, brushing his fur or singing softly to him while his head laid in her lap. He didn’t seem to mind her constant need to touch him, so Marie left it alone, though prepared to snip at her sister in a moment’s notice.

“Careful,  _ asa’ma’lin _ . Not too close to his mouth.” Marie kept her eye on the two as she changed into her night clothes, a breezy sheet tied together with a single rope.

“Can I sleep next to Fen tonight?”

Marie and the wolf exchanged a glance, or at least she thought they did, the way he raised his head at the same time to stare up at the older Lavellan. The wolf harrumphed, his ears flattening against his head. Marie held no doubt that he knew what was asked. Her eyes fell back to the shining face of her sister. “Not tonight. Now get dressed. You can have Fritz’s roll to yourself since he’s sleeping under the stars.”

Louise clapped her hands with glee, Fritz’s spot the warmest in the aravel. She settled in quickly, pulling the blanket up under her chin. “Can I have a story?”

Marie laughed, taking a seat next to her sister and running her fingers through her hair to help flatten it out. “And which one would you like to hear?”

“Can I hear about Mythal again please?”

A chuckle accompanied the request. Her sister had her favorites. “Alright, but then it’s sleep with you.” Louise nodded her head in excitement as Marie cleared her throat to begin. “Mythal, the All-Mother, created Thedas. She created the land and the rivers, the sky and the stars, but most importantly, she created-“

“-the first elves!”

“Do you want me to tell it or not?”

Louise ducked down into her bedroll. “You tell it.”

Marie laid down on the floor next to her, a hand caressing her sister’s soft cheek. “And she created the first elves, from which all the elvhen stem. But from her creations grew another, born from the shadows cast by the loveliness of her creations. That darkness grew and grew until it became living and named itself…”

“Elgar’naan.” Louise shivered as the word rolled off her tongue.

Marie nodded, suppressing a yawn. “Elgar’naan grew jealous, for he too loved Mythal and sought her favor. But Mythal called him an abomination, meaning her land only for her children.  When he retaliated, he stole each of her six children and hid them from her—Can you name them all?”

Louise stuck out a hand as she counted with each name. “Andruil. Dirthamen. Falon’Din. Ghian’nain. June. And Sylaise.”

“That’s right.” She pecked at Louise’s forehead. “Mythal loved them and grew enraged to find out about their disappearance. But when she approached the Shadow King, Elgar’naan had stolen their faces. He used her feelings against her, so that when they fought, she couldn’t defeat him, not when her children screamed with every strike to him. With the last of her strength, she banished him back into the shadows to keep the elvhen safe from his harmful machinations.”

“And Mythal? What happened to her?”

“She became the sun, to keep Elgar’naan away from the people. But at night, she rests, which is why she created the moons, to keep watch while she sleeps and regathers her strength for morrow.”

Louise yawned. “Did Elgar’naan create the shemlen?”

That was a new question. Marie blinked, trying to regain her focus. “According to the Keeper, he did. A poor imitation of the elvhen, his jealousy leading him to create his own worshippers. They do his misdeeds, sowing chaos in the lands and hunting the elvhen.”

“So Elgar’naan killed our parents? Why did Mythal not protect us?”

_ Etunash _ , how was she supposed to answer this question? Their parents died many years ago, when Louise was only a babe, an attack in the forest by some shemlen criminals. Why this question now? She kissed her sister’s forehead once more before rising to her feet. “Maybe,” she started, hoping the rest might come to her. But no answer followed. Instead, she responded with a sigh, shoulders sagging in the exhale. “I don’t know,  _ asa’ma’lin _ . I wish I had all the answers for you, but there are some things that even I don’t know.” She snuffed out the nearby candle and moved to curl into her own bedroll, the wolf at her feet. “Goodnight, Louise. Mythal watch over your dreams.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Kind of a dark bedtime story, right?


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Marie wakes up to two men arguing at the foot of her bed.

Marie woke to hushed, angry male voices on the other side of her bed. Keeping her eyes closed as she faced the wall, she eavesdropped on their argument while pretending to remain asleep. 

“You will not harm them. Stay back,” a gruff voice called.

“Not them, just her,” the other voice hissed in a sinister growl that pimpled goosebumps over her skin. “You sense it, do you not? Her power…”

Not for certain, but she thought she felt something light, almost akin to the wind, brush against the back of her head, ruffling a few strands of her hair. Her hands clenched as she fought back the shiver that threatened to form. That would definitely give her away. 

The first man growled, low, the sound of it like that of an animal.  _ Or a wolf. _ Not giving away her awareness of the situation, she sunk down into her blanket, scooting her foot back to try and tap  _ fen’mirthadra _ . If he could wake, maybe he could chase out the intruders.

_ Of all nights for Fritz to not be here. _

But when she reached to where the wolf laid when she closed her eyes for sleep, she tapped only into the back ankle of a man. A small chirp left her lips as she jumped her foot back to safety, curling in on herself. Maybe the wolf stood over Louise? Or maybe he left, offended by her brother’s actions. Which meant she and Louise were alone in the company of two strange men. Now was not the time for cowardice, not when she didn’t have an eye on her young sister.

She opened her eyes just as the second man laughed, something dark and cutting in the sharp edges of it. “You think you can stop me, Fen’Harel? You, the weakest of all her creations? Who cowered like a dog with its tail between its legs when she called for your help?”

Steadying her breath, hand raised to the top of her blanket to snap it away, she cycled through what spells she might use to get rid of the intruders. A blinding flash could throw them off guard, giving her time to grab Louise and sprint for the opening. The Keeper’s magic would protect them better than any of her own.

Kicking the blankets back, she spun, hand raised as a flash of light expelled from it. The one closest to her shielded his eyes, as if expecting her attack, but the other...  _ was it a man? _ A bulky shadow that stretched against the far wall shrieked as it disintegrated in the flash.

The man closest to her grabbed her wrist. “We need to go, leave before he regains his strength and returns for you.” He jerked her forward, but she snatched her hand away, backing towards her still slumbering sister.

“Excuse me, but who are you? How did you get in here? What was that?”

“There will be time later for your questions.” He grabbed at her wrist again and lead her away from the door, toward her looking glass in the corner of the room. When his hand pressed against the surface, it rippled out, like water. He didn’t give her time to resist, yanking her in after him.

The sensation was immediate, as if plunged into the freezing rivers of the Frostbacks. Her body screamed, heat surging under her skin as it fought to stay warm and not succumb to the tingling numbness. But as quick as the feeling washed over her, it evaporated, leaving her shivering as she took in the new surroundings.

Bright colors mixed with the sudden sunlight left her eyes stinging, and she raised a hand to shield her vision, her mysterious companion doing the same a few steps forward.

“Where are we?” Marie followed him with caution, lingering behind as she studied the pale, sharp-faced man. He dressed in a simple garb of white, similar to her nightclothes. Around his waist hung a black wolf pelt, a sharp contrast to his lack of hair. Ice stabbed her heart as she recognized the fur.  _ Fen’mirthadra. _ “You killed him.” She stopped walking, ready to dive back into the looking glass behind her. 

The man’s eyes followed where she stared, and with a laugh, shook his head. “Ah, no. Not quite.”

“Then where is he? Where are we? Was that… were you talking to a shadow back there? Who even are you and why were you in my home?” The man ignored her, moving forward into the forest whose trees were made of bright red and white stripes, the ground a lush green with a familiar honeyed smell. The man’s stride was quick without any effort put into it, his hands clasped behind his back. She chased after him, careful not to trip over any of the bright red and blue rocks that looked less like boulders and more like her sister’s favorite candy. “That… thing, it called you Fen’Harel, didn’t it? Is that your name?”

“My name is Solas,” he snapped, and she grinned to finally get a response to one of her questions. 

“Solas,” she repeated, making a clumsy attempt to match his steps. “I’m Marie.”

“I know.”

_ What a smug asshole _ . And how exactly did he know? Had he been watching her before breaking into her aravel? “Help me out here then, Solas. Cause you seem to know a lot and I’m more than a little lost here. Did you just kidnap me? Cause I’m a pretty powerful mage, so you should probably take me home before I do something bad to you.” A weak bluff; what did she know about magic beyond the basics?

He chuckled to himself, and she clenched her fists at her side to prevent punching that amusement off his face. She didn’t normally condone violence, but circumstances were quick to change her mind. “You are safe, for the moment. The dreams of a youngling are a pure place, one in which he cannot follow.”

The word  _ youngling _ reminded her of her sleeping sister back through the mirror. “My sister, will she be safe back there with… it?”

“His interest lies only in you. You do not think yourself powerful, but there is so much about magic that you have yet to learn. You will go on to do your clan proud.”

“You speak as though there’s legends about me.” She slowed down, reaching out with a hand to stroke one of the shiny trees. Her palm coated with a hard stickiness, and she wrinkled her nose as she tried to wipe it off on her gown. “You said a dream? We’re in a dream? How is that possible?”

Solas ignored her question, pausing just as a small black-haired pigtailed girl ran across his path, laughing.  _ Louise _ . She watched her little sister run away, chasing a butterfly that looked like a stick of butter. Her eyes followed her sister until the last traces of her disappeared. “We’re in Louise’s dream?”

“It was the closest, but we cannot remain here long. We must keep moving.”

“Moving to where?” When Solas started walking again, toward a nearby clearing, she planted her feet and crossed her arms. “I’m not going anywhere with you until you start answering some questions. Why am I here? What, or who, was that back there? Where is my clan’s guardian?”

Solas glanced behind him, a look of annoyance growing on his face. “Elgar’naan. You told your sister of him. The story was not entirely truthful, but you understand why it is important you stay out of his reach.”

“Elgar’naan.” She laughed for lack of a better response. Was this person serious? “You expect me to believe the Shadow King himself wants me? Knows I exist?” She shook her head. “It was a bedtime story for a young girl. That didn’t really happen. It couldn’t have.”

“A few minutes ago, you also did not think you could travel through a mirror. Truth, reality, it is all subjective.” Solas sighed, then turned to face her. “You wish for answers.”

“How do you even know about that? Why were you spying on my sister and I? Who are you really?”

Solas performed a small bow before her. “Forgive me, I have failed to properly introduce myself. I have told you my name, but your people know me by another.”

A glint of sunlight reflected in his eyes, a cloudy-day kind of blue and grey. The tail from what she thought was a pelt swung behind him. “Fen’mirthadra,” she whispered.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I imagine Solas' waist pelt situation like Kouga's from Inuyasha. With an actual working tail and all.


End file.
